Most health care businesses now know that without a presence on social media, you are missing an important platform for communicating with customers and prospects. You are probably also aware that your competition are also beginning to use social media.

To stay with or ahead of the competition you also need to be seriously looking at how you can use social media for your medical, dental or health care business.

There are main options that are currently available to businesses:

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Google+

The number of people on social media shouldn’t be what dictates which platform is right for your business. The main factor is to understand what platforms your target market is using and how and why they use it. Regardless of which platform you use, you will be more effective if you follow these tips:

Tips for choosing the right social media platform

Facebook

Facebook is ideal for the following types of businesses:

Business to consumer businesses. Businesses who target individual consumers are more suited to facebook than those who target other businesses.

Retail businesses. You can use facebook to run, competitions, post engaging and useful information and entice your users with images and videos.

Business that targets locally. Use Facebook ads to target specific populations.

Twitter

Twitter is an excellent platform for targeting a much broader audience. It allows you to create dialogue and discussion with people who could be great influencers for your business, but are individuals you may never have the chance to meet in person. Twitter has become a key platform for journalists to source breaking news and allows them to develop relationships directly with possible news or story sources. Twitter is more “fast and furious” then Facebook. Generally, it requires more time to maintain – it’s important to engage with your followers several times a day.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is ideal for businesses that target other businesses (B to B). LinkedIn can help you build trust, have regular dialogue with your business networks and position yourself as an expert. It is a great network to distribute expert articles you may write, provide expert opinion and advice by LinkedIn questions and directly target key prospects (through introductions and the upgraded pro version) using Inmail.

Google+

Google+ is Google’s new social media platform. Initially, it’s only been set up for individuals (not businesses) and has only just been opened up for anyone to create a user account. Previously, you needed to be invited by someone who already had an account. It’s a good idea to create a Google+ account and start familiarising yourself with the platform. How useful it is as a marketing tool is yet to be known; however, getting in early and getting familiar with it will increase your chances of using it effectively for your business should it take off